


Name

by Kass



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Angst, First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-17
Updated: 2008-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-01 23:46:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass/pseuds/Kass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reflections on what's in a name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Name

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to Justine and Tzikeh for giving this a once-over—to Yahtzee for the fantastic beta—and to all of the people writing excellent X/M, who have inspired me in this new obsession. (You know who you are.)

Even now, he couldn't hear the name without feeling a frisson of longing.

Maybe that would have been so even had his first lover been someone ordinary, someone innocuous. Someone who had receded from his life, as first lovers are meant to do, to be remembered sweetly in moments of nostalgia.

Of course there was guilt. Could he have done differently? Could things have ended some other way? Had it been some failing on his part, some inability to arouse kindness, that had allowed their arguments to build to such a crescendo that nothing salvageable remained?

Intellectually he understood that free will was one of humanity's greatest blessings, albeit a mixed one. That he might be uniquely able to understand Erik's experiences (as he was uniquely able to understand anyone from the inside, should he choose to) but even that didn't mean Charles knew how to heal him, or should be expected to try.

Although he had tried. Had tried with every fibre of his being. But in the end, he was no Abraham to argue the essential worth of humankind. (That even Abraham had failed to find enough good men to stay God's hand was something Charles preferred to ignore.) And he had rehashed their long parting more times than he cared to count, and every time the painful excavation was futile. There was nothing he could have done.

Jean had caught him wallowing, once, so deep in memory that he had neither heard nor sensed her approach. She'd had to place a hand on his shoulder to call him from his reverie. She had seen more than he'd ever intended to reveal:

_The first time Erik had rocked back onto his fingers and hissed assent, eyes closed, face a portrait of unguarded desire._

How Charles' heart had leapt. How he had guided his erection with fingers he schooled not to tremble.

How the boundaries of Erik's mind had given way with the boundary of his body. How Charles had wept, ecstatic, as Erik's trust and Erik's pleasure combined with his own. How the maelstrom of emotion had washed him away.

How they had lain together for hours, afterwards. Not needing to speak.

There had been a flash of something like pity in Jean's eyes, but Charles was never sure whether the pity had been for Erik or for himself. To his tremendous relief, there had been no trace of revulsion.

And she had shown no added kindness toward Magneto, for which Charles was doubly grateful: in times of crisis he didn't need anyone else conflating the man Erik had once been with the man he had become.

It had been surprisingly soothing that someone understood, or at least that she knew. Knew that Erik was a constant presence at the back of Charles' mind: not Magneto, but Erik as Charles had once known him, fairly radiating with charisma and brilliance which had not yet ceased to be benign.

That this understanding had vanished into the waters, along with everything else Jean was, made her sacrifice even harder to bear.

The name wasn't uncommon. Though here the spelling was was Anglicized, the sound was the same. Surely it was only a matter of time before a young Eric appeared at the gates of the school, before he would need to desensitize himself so that he could say, and hear, the name without wanting to shiver. Charles wasn't sure whether he looked forward to that day or dreaded it. Alone in his room, he tried speaking the syllables, and found they still ran his spine hot and cold.

He could still conjure up the day they'd met, the first conversations they'd had, the way Erik's eyes had seemed to pin him. Their clumsy first kiss. The sound of his own voice, anguished with pleasure, gasping Erik's name.

There was nothing he could have done differently.

* * *

The old disagreement again. "Their capacity for goodness is dazzling, it's unmatched by anything—"

"--save their capacity for evil, which is equal, and absolute." Erik faced away from him, hands clasped loosely behind his back, watching the rain fall against the window.

"But don't we have a moral obligation to act in order to encourage people to live up to their highest potential?"

"Frankly, I doubt that we do."

Charles huffed a frustrated breath. "Erik, you have to understand—"

"I don't have to understand anything." No heat in his lover's voice: that meant he was angrier than usual.

Backpedaling. "Of course not. I didn't mean it that way." More than anything he wanted to slide inside Erik's mind, breathe faith in the goodness of humanity into him like a kiss, but that wasn't playing fair. And the last time he'd tried it they had argued worse than ever.

When Erik spoke, his voice was quiet. "Perhaps it's time to give up."

The words struck him like a blow. "I don't—" For a moment Charles didn't know how to respond. "Please," he said, finally. Knowing that he sounded plaintive, but unable to stop the tone. "It's late. Let's have a drink and go to bed."

"And this will all look better in the morning?" Erik's bitterness was plain in his voice, it radiated from him, drenching Charles with a terrible hopelessness. Erik's terrible hopelessness. "Admit it: this is going nowhere because you're bound to your notions of human goodness," spoken as though the words were literally distasteful, "and I'm bound the be the seer no one believes."

"Until it's too late?" Goading him a little, now, his own anger rising.

"It's already too late, Charles." _For us_ echoed, unspoken.

* * *

Sometimes he wondered whether Erik had been right. Not about humanity, certainly: the closer the crisis came, the clearer it became to Charles that he had chosen the right path. The only path.

But perhaps Erik had been right that it was already too late for them. Loathe as he was to believe in destiny, maybe they were meant to serve as foils for one another. Opposites, unable to align.

Charles couldn't help wishing that his magnetism had been the stronger. That he could have wrenched Erik to his own orientation.

Could he have forced him? Not without resorting to a kind of mental tyranny he could never have countenanced. In their arguments it had seemed that Erik was taunting him, tempting him, trying to make him use his power in the one way he must have known Charles never would. They had shouted at one another; had nearly come to blows. The first few times, they had fallen desperately into bed, seeking release from their quarrel in transcendent moments of helpless unity.

The last few times, they had ended their arguments alone.

As they remained.

As, surely, they were now meant to be. No amount of free will would induce Erik to change his mind, nor any amount of painful memory change Charles'.

Mostly the memories were ignored, as they ought to be. For a man to dwell in remembered youth is pitiful, and besides, Charles couldn't afford to remain lost there. There were too many things to take care of in the wake of Stryker's attack. The students were soldiering on, but most still suffered nightmares. They dismissed them in the light of day, but imprints of their nighttime terror remained, like wispy shadows. Each was a silent reproach for what he had risked in going to see Magneto, what he had almost lost.

Every now and then, at the end of a long day, he allowed himself a fantasy before sleep. Phantom pleasure, phantom pain.

And then he'd close his eyes and slow his breathing. Mindfulness practice. Awareness of every sentient being, and compassion for them. That was what using Cerebro was most like: the moment in meditation when his place in the interconnected web of being became sweetly, achingly clear.

The helmet meant Erik was no longer visible to him. Had Charles given in to the night-time temptation to reach for him and question, or cajole, or weep, the metal would have rebuffed him.

But meditation he had learned early and had practiced well. No alloy could diminish that. Helmet or no, Erik was connected with him in a way nothing could sever.

It didn't make the loss any easier to bear, but that was all right. The name still jolted him. Nothing could sever them. There was nothing he could have done.


End file.
